5 thoughts on “Day of the Dove – Episode 63”

I think the complexion criticism may be misplaced. The actors are not portraying non-white humans. They are alien characters with alternative body chemistry. Andorians are in blue-face, Orions are in Green-face and Klingons are in shiney over-ripe avacado face.

This is very different to the browned up Amerindians and Khan in previous episodes where proper casting should have prevailed.

Michael Ansara will always be my favorite Klingon. He’s ruthless and has a sense of humor. He has an amazing voice as well. He voiced Mr. Freeze in the Batman cartoons.

A cowardly entity that instigates, then feeds on, racism… Was this Star Trek episode written yesterday?

I wouldn’t have said that the make-up in this episode is racist, just awful! It looks like they’ve rubbed a chocolate bar over their face until it all melted!

In fairness it probably looks a lot worse on our giant HD screens than on the TVs of the time. Also, I wonder if Susan Howard complaned about her make-up – she seems to be more ‘heavily tanned’ towards the end of the episode versus ‘several coats of Ronseal Dark Oak’.

The actors may not be playing non-white humans, but they’re playing the counterpart to mostly-white humans in a story about racist violence, and throughout the entire series the Klingons are portrayed as violent barbarian enemies. The fact that their skin tone is then dark (rather than blue, like Andorians), which maps directly onto a human race which is also consistently portrayed as violent barbarians, is pretty hard to interpret otherwise. It may not be purposefully racist (the whole theme of the episode suggests otherwise), but it’s definitely evidence of a systemic cultural bias that places pale skin as the good guys and dark skin as the bad guys, however unconsciously that bias may manifest iteself.

Oh, and Calvary swords do not appear….cavalry swords maybe. Calvary swords would be Roman short swords. Common pronunciation bobble!
Oh, the “eternity” Kirk was talking about was, I always assumed, the very long time the entity would probably keep them alive to fight if it could. I assume it could keep the ship’s life support going as long as it wanted, and if it could heal mortal wouldn’t, it could probably beat aging, at least for a long long while. So they’d be stuck in a warpless ship fighting for as long as the entity could keep them alive. Eek.

I always assumed that the colony never existed, but that there were of unknown colonies around due to the Khan-era sleeper ships, and maybe generation ships that were lost track of due to wars on earth after they were launched. So the entity faked a message from a mythical colony to get them close enough to trap.